My first major foray into Gnu/Linux was with the Gentoo flavor. Some of my friends used Debian, but the whole idea of Gentoo just appealed more to me.

Once I knew a lot more of what was going on under the hood, I was attracted to Ubuntu for its focus on the desktop, while still running Gentoo on my servers.

I now run Ubuntu exclusively in my home network, where Linux boxen are concerned.

The point of this article is to say that though I run it exclusively, I don’t really see how lay users can use it. I still have to do a lot of things by hand that I shouldn’t.

The most glaring example that I have found is the built in Remote Desktop server/client combination. For whatever reason, this has never really worked well for me. One might think that the default settings would be optimized for Ubuntu > Ubuntu connections, but it doesn’t feel that way. Connecting to an Ubuntu server from Mac OS X using Jolly’s FastVNC is great. Connecting from tightvnc-client on Windows XP is fine. Connecting Karmic > Karmic is painful and useless.

Searching around, I found many suggestions for FreeNX by nomachine. This combination is very, very good. Best bet so far, but I haven’t figured out how to connect to the running session, on screen 0. It uses some voodoo and creates a login session over X. I think that we could do this anyway, but we would have to put it on another term? Not sure, but I’m pretty sure I logged in like this from putty using some win32 xserver.

For the record, the activity that I wanted to do using the desktop (of course I could have used command line) was cd burning and archiving. I wanted to use the GUI to more easily navigate files structures and create discs.